ABSTRACT
Advanced materials play an increasingly important role in modern manufacturing industries, especially in aircraft, automobile, tool, die, and moldmaking industries. The greatly improved thermal, chemical, and mechanical properties of these materials such as improved strength, heat resistance, wear resistance, and corrosion resistance are making conventional and nonconventional machining processes unable to machine them economically. Table 13.1 compares the nonconventional machining methods regarding their removal rate, accuracy, surface finish, power needed, and the capital cost. The technological improvement of these machining processes can be achieved by combining different physicochemical action on the material being machined. In particular, a mechanical action, which is used in conventional material removal processes, can be combined with respective interactions applied in unconventional material removal processes such as electrodischarge machining (EDM) or electrochemical machining (ECM). The reasons for developing combined (hybrid) machining processes are to make use of the combined or mutually enhanced advantages and to avoid or reduce some adverse effects the constituent processes produce when they are individually applied.
